What Happens When You're Suspected of Abducting Your Own Child (VIDEO)

I have a question for the members of the sports world who got all up in arms about a supposed child abduction happening in a California park while ESPN continued to film an interview with 16-year-old skateboarder Nyjah Huston: do you have any experience with kids? The video, which shows a stiff kid being dragged by a full-grown man across the ground as he digs his heels into the dirt, made me shudder too. Because I know what it's like to be suspected of abducting your own child.

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Let's roll the videotape, shall we?

Looks like a guy dealing with a bratty kid to me. Yup, a guy. Which seems to be what all the hullabaloo is about. A woman dealing with a brat is just a mom. A man trying to discipline a kid ... well, he must be abducting the child, right?

It's no wonder that in 2011, women are still kvetching that they want men to pitch in with parenting. Every time a guy tries, he's labeled a creeper. I know. It happened to my husband.

Like the kid in the video, my daughter was pitching one heck of a fit. She was tired, and she hadn't gotten her way, and in the tradition of 5-year-olds having no sense of "public vs. private," she was standing in the cart at our local Target holding onto the seat and slamming it back and forth. But it was the screaming at me that sent my husband over the edge. We spend a lot of time trying to drill the concept of "respect" for others into her head, and she was being about as disrespectful as can be.

He picked her up, slung her over his shoulder, and proceeded to walk out of the store. Like the kid in the video you're about to see, she'd made her body as stiff as a board save for her hands, which she was using to smack her Daddy around the head as she told him exactly what a "not nice Daddy" he was.

She was acting like a brat. Which is exactly why she was being taken out of the store by her father, who is as "involved" as dads get. To him this was just part of being a parent: disciplining his daughter.

Having a couple of people give him the evil eye and follow him to our car wasn't. At first he thought they were just annoyed by the screaming child (who wouldn't be?). But as he settled her into her car seat, he realized he was being watched. And as he moved into the front seat of the car to sit, quietly ignoring her tantrum (aka not giving her the attention she so obviously wanted with the fit), he watched the couple come around the car to examine our license plate, then write it down.

Friends have all told us we should be glad that someone was thinking fast, that they were writing down the plate in case they saw an "abducted child" warning show up on TV that night. And a small part of me is. But the larger part of me wonders why a dad disciplining his daughter (she was, after all, screaming at him that he was a "bad Daddy") is such a shock to the system.

Female friends have complained countless times on Facebook about having to take their screaming kids out of a store and hearing people mutter about "getting that child under control." None have reported being stalked. None have been suspected of abducting their own kids.

Now go watch that video again. Does it look like a child abduction in broad daylight, in front of TV cameras? Or does it look like a man just trying to get a petulant child to cooperate?